This was a period in which a new humanism found expression. It is also a period of invasion and colonisation, in which different cultures and languages come into powerful if creative conflict. And while the period can certainly be said to witness a growth of official religious and racial prejudice, it is at the same time a period of mutual curiosity and exchange. Reading across Latin, French and English texts in translation or the original, students will have access to the most sophisticated and delightful works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, works which articulate new views on many fronts: on the place and experience of women in both feudal and monastic society; on the nature of Christian warfare; on chance and destiny; on the nature of morality and reason; on what it means to encounter cultural and linguistic difference, to take just a few examples.

The period covered by this paper is in many ways characterised by plurality, openness, and exchange. Texts evince a fascination with the natural order, the human body and the complexity of political, social and sexual relations.  The extraordinary plurality of the primary materials covered by this paper is matched by the range of critical approaches that have been brought to bear upon them. It was on texts like Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales that nineteenth-century philologists practised some of the earliest forms of the discipline of English literary study, while in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries critics have approached medieval literature, from historicist, formalist, feminist, psychoanalytic, sociological, queer, and postcolonial perspectives. A recurrent feature of critical writings focusing on this period is a concern with how a sensitivity to historical difference interacts with an awareness of the urgent relevance of the past for the present moment. 

This was the first age of print, when presses transformed the conditions of writing, creating circumstances in which hack writers, flagrant self-publicists and the first newspaper journalists would flourish. It was an era of travel, mercantile expansion, and empire-building, when writers began to take the globe as their canvas and to translate numerous works from ancient and modern languages. It was a period defined by educational transformation in which training in eloquent, persuasive speech assumed a new dominance. It was also an age of inquiry, in which writers explored new approaches to the created universe, the human body and the self. Some major authors, such as John Donne or Margaret Cavendish, engaged in their writing with the newest developments of the scientific revolution. But you may also find yourself reading works of political or moral philosophy, broadside ballads, treatises on cross-dressing or the criminal underworld, emblem books, travel narratives and science fiction. The world lies all before you.

This is a huge and various period of literature, stretching from the later works of John Milton to the death of Charles Dickens and early works by Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. The powerful influence of Paradise Lost runs right through the eighteenth century until at least the Romantics; Restoration comedy may be compared with the later drama of Thomas Sheridan and Joanna Baillie; shifting relations between, and valuations of, the personal and the public are intensely at stake throughout the ‘long 18th century’, as the explosion of print culture transforms the nature of readership; the apprehension and representation of the natural world is central to much remarkable writing (and art); the novel develops – or simply mutates? – from Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, and George Eliot; 19th-century poetry draws on and reshapes the legacy of Romantic lyric; and in this period of many ‘Revolutions’ (1688, financial, agrarian, American, French, Haitian, industrial, the American Civil War), literature’s relation to opposition, protest, emancipation and radical critique is a rich field of study.

Covering literature written between 1830 and 1945, this paper explores an extraordinarily diverse range of texts in relation to the social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts that shaped them. Students can pursue individual interests through authors, genres, literary movements, and critical debates, while engaging with topics such as empire, race, gender, identity, war, modernity, consumer culture, and national belonging. The course also encourages exploration of literature’s relationship with other arts, earlier literary traditions, and writing in English from around the world.

Covering literature from 1870 to the present day, this paper enables students to read a wide range of world literatures and study them in the light of the period’s diverse social and intellectual lives. Students may pursue individual programmes of work through literary movements, genres, authors, critical and theoretical questions, and literary responses to issues such as the suffragette movement, gender and identity politics, empire, race, ethnicity, and consumerism. The paper also explores relationships between literature, other arts, other literatures in English, and earlier literary traditions.